A great return to France for a general of the grand army, more than 200 years after his death ... The remains of Charles Etienne Gudin de la Sablonnière, who died in 1812 during Napoleon's Russian campaign, arrived in France on Tuesday, from Moscow.
Charles Étienne Gudin was a French general, mown down on August 19, 1812 by an enemy cannonball during the battle of Valoutina Gora, 20 kilometers east of Smolensk, a Russian town located near the current border with Belarus.
The Minister Delegate for Veterans, Geneviève Darrieussecq, presided over the ceremony for the arrival of the body in the early afternoon at Le Bourget airport, and indicated that the general would be buried at the Invalides on December 2, "with the honors which are due to him ”, in accordance with the wishes of several associations.
"We still have characters that we can not deny," commented Monday Joëlle Garriaud-Maylam, senator for the French abroad and honorary president of the Paris-Napoléon 2021 association, who hoped for such an outcome. by deploring "low-level polemics".
Because the file was a little undermined.
The general's remains were indeed found thanks to Pierre Malinowski, a French historian and ex-soldier close to the far right and with support in the Kremlin.
Former parliamentary assistant to Jean-Marie Le Pen, he is president of the Franco-Russian Foundation for Historical Initiatives.
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A personality which undoubtedly explains the reluctance of the Elysée. "Gudin was to be buried at the Invalides with great pomp and it was to be the first part of the commemorations of Napoleon's death" before everything was canceled, the historian assured last May at Radio Sputnik, a media funded by Moscow.
In addition to his personality, he himself also mentioned the health crisis as an explanation, but above all the deterioration of relations between Paris and Moscow around the fate of the Russian political opponent Alexeï Navalny, whose release the West is demanding. Whatever the reason, President Macron was absent at Le Bourget. And the soldier's remains were repatriated in an A320 funded by Russian oligarch Andrey Kozystin, according to several media. "It is not the time for controversy, we have very important memorial links with Russia," concluded Ms. Darrieussecq after the ceremony.
